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PAGE 8
PASTOR GENERAL'S REPORT, NOVEMBER 22, 1985
At a rally, Ethel Smyth, a middle-aged politician, addressed
the crowd.
•r
ask you, will you ever allow the Irish tri
color, the dirty rotten flag of the IRA murderers, to be
flown in our land?· she screamed. •No, no, never1• came the
angry reply•••• ·The time for talking is over,• cried Smyth,
to the sound of wild applause. •And the time for resistance
has begun. If Ulster is to be saved, the young men and women
must rise up. Prepare and keep your powder dry.••••
•No one knows what's going to happen,• says John McMichael,
spokesman for the Ulster Defense Association, the self
described •private Protestant army.• •But if Courl fears are
confirmed, then this is the beginning of the end. We expect
the worse and are preparing for it. We� the ingredients
here for a civil�-····
'l'V=Televised Violence Have you noticed that events inside South Africa
seem to have calmed down? If so, that could be due to a government ban
(why did Pretoria wait so long?) on television crews and still photo
graphers who are no longer permitted to record riotous behavior.
Equally as important, without this audience, the perpetrators of
violence lose a lot of zeal for their activity. Television, espe
cially, has perverted the coverage of news events, according to Paul
Johnson, who wrote in the November 9 issue of THE SPECTATOR, a British
news magazine:
The South African government's ban on all television, radio
and photographic news coverage of rioting in the areas
affected by the state of emergency is a belated recognition
by authority that electronic journalism, dealing as it does
in instant image and sound, is quite different from the old
journalism of word and print. It is different for at least
three reasons••••
First, television news coverage reaches a near-universal
audience. The classes of society most prone to violence,
whether criminal, mindless or political <the last two often
the same thing), are overwhelmingly composed of male teen
agers and young men of poor education in big cities. Many
cannot read at all or, if they can, read very little. They
read tabloids, perhaps, mainly for sport, comic strips and
crime reports. But they all watch television, and potential
rioters form one of the most addicted groups. Television has
s.n
inherent propensity to promote violence, since it must
constantly display dramatic action to hold the flagging
attention of its•••viewers•••• Hence, for the political
manipulators who want to increase the level of violence in
our society, television is the perfect medium, and that is
why terrorists cultivate it so assiduously.
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Secondly, the emotional impact of television, especially on
immature and poorly cultivated minds, is so much stronger
than the printed word as to be different in kind rather than
degree. When a writing journalist is describing a scene of
violence, he necessarily imposes a kind of order on chaos by
the mere discipline of telling the tale in a consequential